The Temptation of Elminster - Ed Greenwood [17]
Two: Doom Rides A Dapple Gray
And in the days when Mystra revealed herself not, and magic was left to grow as this mage or that saw best or could accomplish, the Chosen called Elminster was left alone in the world…that the world might teach him humility, and more things besides.
Antarn the Sage
from The High History of
Faerunian Archmages Mighty
published circa The Year of the Staff
When chill ruled mornings, mists lay heavy among the trees. Few folk of the Starn ever ventured this far into Howling Ghost Wood, so the pickings were plentiful…and Immeira had never seen any howling ghosts. Her sack was already half-full of nuts, berries, and alphran leaves. Soon the moontouch blooms would sprout in handfuls among the trees, followed by fiddle-heads and butter cones… and to think some folk…even some Starneir…claimed that only a hunter who could bring down a stag a tenday could live off the woods.
Immeira rubbed an itch on her cheek thoughtfully, and looked back to where the trees thinned. Over the fields beyond them, down in the vale where Gar's Road crossed the Larrauden, stood Buckralam's Starn.
"Forty cottages full of nosy old women who weave cloaks all day while their sheep wander untended," the bard Talost had once described it. Longtime Starneir were still angry over those words and could be counted on to provide a few new and even more colorfully twisted misfortunes the gods could…and should…visit on the over-critical bard, forthwith. As far as Immeira could tell, Talost had got it about right, but she had already learned, and learned well, that truth wasn't necessarily highly prized around the Starn.
Her father had disappeared while adventuring. He was part of a proper chartered adventuring band who called themselves Taver's Talons after the brawling, always guffawing old warrior Taver who led them with the sun shining back off his bald pate. In Immeira's memory Taver still sat his saddle, bright and bluff, but folk said he was bones and dust these eight years gone. None could tell his bones from those of the next six…her father among them…who'd fallen to the dragon's jaws that day.
The Starn had talked of Taver's Talons for eight winters now, and some of them swore the Talons were fiends in human form, hiding here to better corrupt the women of passing caravans and spread their dark seed over all Faerun. Others were just as insistent that the Talons had been bandits all along, just lurking hereabouts until they could learn all about Starneir and the forest trails so as to found a bandit realm back in the real woods, not so far off. Some called this kingdom Talontar…to others it was Darkride…but no one knew just where its borders started or who dwelt there or why they'd never come down on the Starn with ready bows and hungry knives in the years since the Talons had fallen or stolen away or committed whatever great crime kept them now in hiding.
Yes, truth was something a wagging tongue or two could change overnight in the Starn. The only exception to that, so far as Immeira could see, was the truth that lurked in the sharp and ready blades of the Iron Fox and his men.
They'd come out of the east on Gar's Road some six springs ago. A handful of hardened mercenaries with cold steel in their hands and a world-weary, merciless set to their colder eyes. The leader was a tall, fat man whose helm peaked with an iron fox head, even his men called him only "the Iron Fox." He rode into the courtyard of the little Shrine of the Sheaf, ordered the feeble old priest Rarendon out into the spring snows at sword point, and taken the place as his home.
Henceforth, he told the silent villagers at the Trough and Plough that evening, services to Chauntea would be held out in the open fields, as was proper. Former keeps were better suited to the purpose they'd been built for: housing men of action such as he and his men, who henceforth would dwell in the Starn and defend it, to the betterment of